Project Management: Foundations to Practice · Foundations of Project Management
What Is a Project?
Every project management framework, from PMBOK to PRINCE2 to Agile, rests on a specific definition of what actually counts as a project. This chapter examines that definition closely and why the boundary between a project and ongoing operations matters more than it first appears.
PMI defines a project as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result [1]. 'Temporary' means the project has a defined beginning and end, not that it is short; a project can run for a decade and still be temporary in this sense, since it terminates once its objective is met or the project is closed. 'Unique' means the outcome differs in some distinguishing way from other outputs of similar type, even if the process used to create it is highly repeatable, such as a construction firm building its fiftieth near-identical office building on a new site with new site-specific conditions.
- A project is temporary (has a defined start and end) and unique (produces a distinguishable outcome), per PMI's definition.
- Temporary does not mean short; a project can span years and still be temporary in the sense that matters.
- Operations are ongoing and repetitive, evaluated against sustained performance rather than a fixed scope, schedule, and budget.
- Mislabeling ongoing operational work as a project creates confusion, since there is no genuine endpoint for it to reach.